Salut! Soundings

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Salut! Salam: what, why and where

It is not really yet another blog. But Salut! Salam has made its debut as an independent site, breaking free from a mere sidebar location here.

There is a good reason for this.

Believe it or not, Salut! sites cannot be viewed from many, perhaps most, home computers in Abu Dhabi. I thought I was being censored, possibly because I occasionally use images from Flickr and - since Flickr is a vast photo-sharing archive that has been known to house some saucy material - that site has sometimes been blocked.

But no one, it appears, is trying to gag me. The regulatory body here tells me the problem is technical.

Salut! and its offshoots, with the exception now of Salut! Salam, are hosted by Typepad.

There is no difficulty in accessing Typepad's own pages. I can log on from home, write articles and post them to my sites. I just cannot then see the sites themselves, and it is the same when I try from some hotel websites or the internet facilities at Abu Dhabi airport.

People trying to open Salut! sites (or, as I understand, others hosted by Typepad) soon tire of waiting for something to happen.

Crucially, however, they do not see the customary message stating that the site is bloced because it offends the moral or cultural values of the UAE. The sites just don't open. Despite an assertion to me from the Typepad support centre that "some" of its sites are blocked in the UAE, this simply is not the case on the information I have.

Asking me to explain the technical issues is like asking John McCain to describe what it's like to win a presidential election, or expecting most Manchester United fans to be able to point to Manchester on a map.

The man at the regulatory body said it was all to do with "boosters". I can view my sites in the office because the company I work for has boosters that are powerful enough to complete the link to Typepad sites.

So Salut! Salam has been established at Blogspot. It is essentially what you - if you have no trouble gaining access - have seen here though the images, once I have had a chance to add them to each posting, will sometimes differ and there will be some additional material.

I do not want to turn this into a Typepad-bashing exercise, but may as well also point out that one consequence of radical changes it has suddenly introduced to the way users format their sites is that various tasks have become more difficult or more time consuming.

Typepad will say it's all my fault for taking too long to adjust to these new "improvements". My reply is that nothing was actually broken - except whatever is supposed to link Typepad and the UAE - until they tried to fix it.

Comments

It is not really yet another blog. But Salut! Salam has made its debut as an independent site, breaking free from a mere sidebar location here.

There is a good reason for this.

Believe it or not, Salut! sites cannot be viewed from many, perhaps most, home computers in Abu Dhabi. I thought I was being censored, possibly because I occasionally use images from Flickr and - since Flickr is a vast photo-sharing archive that has been known to house some saucy material - that site has sometimes been blocked.